House Cleaning

Not much going on here at Expat HQ of late-- we're hosting a guest, and will be traveling to a Fabulous! European! City! at the end of the week (city itself TBD), and I'm doing some mop-up work for the company I was assisting in Munich. In lieu of an actual substantive post, I've been playing around with some of the features of this here blog and trying to keep things fresh.

I'm personally not crazy about the most obvious difference from last week, the color change. I quite liked the charcoal backdrop, in large part because (1.) it looked cool, and (2.) it is not the most common color for a blog, so it really stood out for the lurkers and stumblers. But, I'm going to give this dark blue thing a whirl-- it likely won't be the final color, and things may well revert back to the original color scheme, so bear with me.

I'd also like to point out a couple of changes to the links on the sidebar. The Pacific Northwest-centric food blog Sunday Gravy has been regrettably dropped-- I think author Don B. got too busy, and the thing hadn't been updated in quite a while. In its place is something completely different, The Smallest Star, a blog from artist, screenwriter, musician, actor and director Cory McAbee. I'm a big fan of Cory's and he has made some of the most fiercely original films I've ever seen, The American Astronaut and his most recent creation Stingray Sam (trailer here), both of which can be described as "Space-Musical-Westerns," genres in which, not coincidentally, an original story can trump budget limitations. Cory's blog doesn't get updated all that often and more or less follows him as he tours to promote his films (The American Astronaut, despite being some 9 years old has achieved "cult" status and still plays in theaters). An interesting travelogue from a singularly talented artist.

I'm also replacing one Paris photo blog with another. Goodbye Paris Daily Photo, hello unimaginatively titled Daily Photo In Paris. It's hard to go wrong with either blog, and the subject matter happens to be one of the most photogenic cities in the world, but the work on display in this new link here just seems... I dunno, crisper, perhaps less consciously "arty." As the fates would have it, the author/photographer is on break, and won't be back for a couple weeks! But scroll through the archives and see what I mean.